Information abundance: How to avoid drowning in data.

‘Information abundance’ sounds like something most companies would love to have. After all, what organization wouldn’t want to know everything about everything? But in today’s round-the-clock, always-on business environment, ‘abundance’ quickly becomes ‘overload’ and that can cripple a company’s efforts at knowledge management.

Imagine the massive flow of daily information on the Internet pouring into your office computer without any way to filter or organize it. It’d be effectively useless for any business purpose, forcing you to revert back to the encyclopedias you have collecting dust in the attic. Clearly, there needs to be a way to manage today’s ever-increasing influx of information.

A fix for the information firehose.

An Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) platform is one such solution. For global companies with employees spread across timezones, information overload is a real concern. They justifiably worry that thousands of employees communicating and collaborating at once could create an avalanche of information too massive for anyone to process, in effect reducing otherwise valuable information to nothing more than “noise.”

Worse, as communication and collaboration increases over time, they reasonably expect a lot more content to be generated — more posts, polls, events, pages, tasks, and more everything — and with it, proportionally more noise.

Not coincidentally, tibbr was designed to solve that very problem. As an advanced ESN platform, tibbr’s social software makes it easy for employees to parse incoming information quickly using tools like subjects, filtering, content curation, tasks, and @mentions. These various features let users get the right information at the right time. Information primarily consisting of three types: Emergent, Polished, and Contextual.

Emergent information

Emergent information is raw news — current, dynamic, and unprocessed. It may include industry alerts, company press releases, or new emerging technologies, but it’s always information that employees can still affect and alter. Sharing information in its rough form early is often better than sharing information in its finished form too late. The world of business is fast moving and dynamic, so if you only share finished content, you’ll miss lots of opportunities.

Polished information

Polished information is completed content — work that has already been formalized, approved, and even archived. These are the documents, videos, press releases, and presentations, that employees can share with external sources. They are key pieces of company knowledge and a great resource, but they lack the fluidity and responsiveness of emergent information.

Contextual information

Contextual information is linked to the decisions, challenges, and input that took place to get something to the final form — context that can be sliced, diced and reused in other ways by other people. Context reveals the steps taken, the changes, the results, and the improvements. Expecting employees to figure out how something was accomplished solely from looking at the finished product is like asking someone to create tonight’s dinner just by showing them yesterday’s Beef Wellington — the process steps and fundamental knowledge are a critical part of any assignment. With enterprise social software, that contextual information can be saved and revisited by new employees for many years so that the knowledge you’ve invested so heavily in creating doesn’t walk out the door every time an employee does.

What’s your plan for dealing with TMI?

It’s not enough to be able to handle one or two of these types of information, simple file-sharing is not enough these days. Companies need a platform to capture and retain the torrent of information its employees will keep generating and sharing in a way that won’t overwhelm them or let them miss out on opportunities.

If you’d like to see how the tibbr Enterprise Social Platform can help your company manage its information flow, click here for a free trial.